HDMI cables

[jack]

Wow, I'd always heard people complaining about the ridiculous mark-up of HDMI cables, but I always assumed it was you know, a one hundred percent markup, or a two hundred percent markup, not a five thousand percent markup.

Comments

[jack]

Thank you for a detailed answer :)

I don't know exactly compared to what: I just looked on amazon for a reasonably priced cable (£1) and assumed that represented what it cost to manufacture and sell, and what some other cables cost (£50) and divided one by the other.

It's an interesting point that hi-fis may be expected to come with a lot of custom set-up, polish, etc. I remember someone (possibly you?) linking to a study comparing a cheap low-end system to high-end system, except that the low-end system was considerably more expensive than I'd ever bothered to spend on multimedia, so it's quite possible that a low-end "serious" system is significantly better than what I'd buy, if it's guaranteed not to have loose connections, etc, even if the expensive cables are not much better themselves, but just a nice perk for buying from an expensive shop.

But I've basically no experience with that industry whatsoever. I just want to plug Consumer Device A into Consumer Device B, and it comes as a shock that if you buy an ethernet cable, or a usb cable, or a scart cable, or whatever the cables analogue TVs used to use were called, you can just buy a standard one and it's "good enough", but if you buy an HDMI cable there's a whole ecosystem of competing cables. I know it might be important, but it's not how I expect cables to work :)